Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ by the BBC

So while the scheming Anne Boleyn was exonerated on stage and screen, beginning with Maxwell Anderson’s 1948 play, Anne of the Thousand Days; and while the devout torturer Thomas More was deified on stage and screen in Robert Bolt’s 1960 drama A Man For All Seasons; and while Henry VIII was portrayed by Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) as an endearingly macho combination of robust power and prodigious appetites (an early Chris Christie, you might say); and while Henry’s daughter Queen Elizabeth was lionized by Hollywood stars like Flora Robson, Bette Davis, and Jean Simmons in costume films like Fire Over England (1937), The Virgin Queen (1955), and Young Bess (1953); the role of Cromwell was typically delegated to a rumpled and dyspeptic supporting actor like Leo McKern. In the eyes of conventional wisdom, Cromwell was the malign and shadowy figure who out-Machiavellied Machiavelli, setting off (in the words of one typically conventional critic) “a tidal wave of religious, political and societal turmoil that reverberated throughout 16th-century Europe.”

Nasty deeds

But of course every story has at least two sides, and conventional wisdom is usually wrong. If you clear your mind of its preconceptions, you might possibly see Cromwell as a force for stability following the turmoil of England’s dynastic War of the Roses — a force whose ministrations ushered in the English Reformation and England’s Golden Age under Queen Elizabeth. At the very least, it’s possible to perceive Cromwell as a fallible commoner struggling imperfectly to survive by his wits in a vicious court that valued bloodlines and breeding over brains.

The remarkable achievement of Hilary Mantel’s two recent novels about Henry’s court — Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012) — lies not so much in any historical discovery as in their fresh perspective: Both books are narrated by Cromwell, forcing us to see events through his eyes so that we end up, inevitably, rooting for him even when he does nasty things. After all, we persuade ourselves, if this Cromwell abuses his power now and then, well, perhaps he’s simply reacting defensively against others even more powerful and more abusive than he.

Darkness and shadow

Mantel’s books have now been adapted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in two three-hour Broadway plays, sometimes staged in tandem, thanks to which Cromwell has lately achieved, in the words of BSR’s Carol Rocamora, “rock-star status.” (Read her review here.) But the crowning treatment, I suspect, is the BBC’s sensitive six-part TV adaptation of Wolf Hall, which concluded on PBS stations this past Sunday with Anne Boleyn’s execution in 1536.

This nuanced and intelligent series reminds us that, in the hands of a skilful writer (Peter Straughan), an assured director (Peter Kosminsky), and above all an actor of surpassing subtlety and restraint (Mark Rylance), an intimate medium like TV — viewed in the privacy of one’s home, where you can fancy yourself standing alone and friendless with Cromwell against a conniving court — can accomplish feats that defy the power of either live theater or movies. As Fintan O’Toole recently observed in the New York Review of Books (click here), Cromwell is above all a lurker and a watcher in a world of darkness and shadows, and the stage has no place for lurking or darkness. But the TV camera becomes the ideal vehicle to view Cromwell’s world through Cromwell’s eyes and, in the process, “catch glimpses of Cromwell’s soul.”

Can women govern?

In the similarly nuanced performance of Damian Lewis, Henry VIII comes across not merely as a fickle lout, divorcing wives as he tires of them, but a monarch concerned above all with producing a stream of male heirs — the key to ending the factional intrigue at court and assuring the stability of his realm. To an age that lacked the advanced civil institutions that we take for granted today, this obsession with royal succession wasn’t as foolish as we modern sophisticates may think. The need to preserve the Tudor dynasty under a succession of strong kings was no minor concern in the aftermath of the War of the Roses, which had placed the Tudors on the throne less than half a century earlier.

Indeed, as recently as 1900, generals in Republican France defended their cover-up in the Dreyfus affair by arguing that men would die for their king or their army but not for a politician. Even more recently, in 1936 — with Hitler looming on the horizon — Great Britain was plunged into a constitutional crisis when King Edward VIII abdicated in order to marry a divorced commoner. And of course it’s only in the last generation or two that most countries have accepted the notion that a woman could govern a nation effectively (and I can think of at least one major nation that still hasn’t).

Henry VIII’s third marriage, to Jane Seymour, did indeed produce the desired son (as Anne Boleyn could not). But only one son: Jane Seymour died shortly after giving birth to the future Edward VI in 1537, and Edward survived only six years after Henry’s death in 1547. Nor did Henry’s last three wives produce any sons either. And Henry’s daughter Elizabeth turned out to be one of the wisest sovereigns in the history of the planet. But we know this only in retrospect. To anyone living in England in the 1530s, the future peace and prosperity of the kingdom was a very iffy matter.

Losing favor

Like many social systems that now seem callous and inhumane — tribalism, say, or slavery, or feudalism — the British class system once seemed a reasonable and even enlightened tradeoff for maintaining what was, after all, the world’s most civilized society. The English system of primogeniture assured that the estates of the wealthy would remain intact in the hands of nobles and “gentlemen” whose fortunes and titles, in theory, endowed them with both the leisure time and the independence to devote themselves to the common good. Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son, never questioned this system (as we would), nor did he resent the nobles’ reminders that he was their inferior. Instead he focused his energies on operating within this system, not overthrowing it.

Of course Cromwell himself was beheaded in 1540, apparently having fallen out of favor for his part in arranging Henry’s unconsummated marriage to Anne of Cleves. (Henry later expressed regret for executing his right-hand man.) So in some respects the BBC’s conclusion of Wolf Hall ends as an anticlimax. Having engineered the trial and conviction of Anne Boleyn without strict regard for the rules of evidence, Cromwell is hugged effusively by Henry, but the last thing we see is Cromwell’s troubled and wrinkled face, locked literally and figuratively in Henry’s embrace. The king may have reason to rejoice, but Cromwell knows instinctively that the moment he lets his guard down, he is a dead man.

After all these centuries, we still don’t know for sure whether Anne Boleyn was really an adulteress (as she was charged by Cromwell) or simply an ambitious woman framed by her jockeying enemies (not to mention as her own machinations). And for the past few centuries nobody much cared. By opening such an engaging and best-selling Pandora’s box (translation rights in 30 countries!), Hilary Mantel, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and now the BBC have raised new hope that someone may yet be inspired to find the answer.